On Teaching Conceptual Graphs

In this paper we describe and evaluate two on-line courses on Conceptual Graphs and Prolog+CG given to 2 and 3 year students of Humanistic Informatics at Aalborg University, Denmark. The average student had no prior experience with formal languages, nor did they have any advanced mathematical background, but nevertheless they succeeded in achieving skills to read and write Conceptual Graphs of some complexity. Furthermore, we document how students through first-hand experience, begin to formulate and reflect on thoughts about the phenomenon of formalization. The course material consists of an introductory lecture, comprehensive textbook material, and a number of exercises and interactive multiple choice quizzes, all of which has now been made public available and can be accessed from the web-site mentioned above.